Too Busy

I have not posted a blog for over a week. With dialysis taking so much of my time, I am always busy, but this has been an unusually busy time.

My friend Lois sings in the choir at Garland’s First Baptist Church. On Sunday I went to hear her sing at their Christmas program, with a pageant of little children as angels and Mary cradling in her arms a real baby. The mystery of Christmas: How did she keep the infant so quiet?

On Tuesday I drove into Dallas, only a twelve minute drive from my place to the home of Betty Smith, for a luncheon reunion of “girls” who graduated from Texas Woman’s University in 1950. In past years there gathered a large group of alums living in the Dallas area. On Tuesday there were only ten of us. We passed around pictures of great-grandbabies.

Wednesday a group of us boarded the Montclair bus for another trip into Dallas. This time it was a 30-minute ride to the theater in the old bath house at White Rock Lake. We saw a play about a Catholic family celebrating Christmas in Pittsburgh, when the son shows up with a Jewish fiancé.
I thought it an interesting play, using humor to show love overcoming prejudice. As so often happens, our reaction to things depends on our previous experiences. Something similar happened in my husband John’s family. In a Pittsburgh suburb, his sister and her husband, devout Catholics, must have been dismayed when their only child, a daughter, became engaged to a Jew. Now Maggi and Stephen have been married for 30 years and have two accomplished sons, one of them an M.D.

On the bus going home, I asked the old lady sitting next to me if she enjoyed the play. A fundamentalist Christian, she was offended by the whole concept of the play. “That’s not my God. It was all lies.”

Since I skipped dialysis on Wednesday, I had to go on both Thursday and Friday. There were special events at Montclair afterwards each afternoon. On Thursday I grabbed a couple of cookies and went to my apartment and collapsed. Yesterday I felt better and went down for the chili cooking contest before another evening of recliner television. Again “Christmas in Washington, D.C.” brought back memories. The concert was in the National Building Museum, which impressed my 10-year-old grandson Doug when we went there as part of an intergenerational Elderhostel. Now he’s a senior at Southern Illinois University.

This afternoon Lois comes to go with me to the Christmas program at the Garland Senior Center. That will end this too-busy week. I’m tired. Too much activity. I’ve become over-scheduled.

A great thing about the trip I made to Europe with David: We had no fixed schedule. Each morning we got in the rental car and started out, sightseeing haphazardly at places we discovered along the way. When darkness came, we stopped at a roadside inn for supper and then looked for a place to sleep. No rush. No trying to “make it” to some specific event. Every day was a surprise. As I said, it was great.